SUPPLIER INTERVIEW: CLAYTEX
“Simulation means you’re not
necessarily having to increase the
level of testing, despite the extra
complexity being put into vehicles”
Mike Dempsey, managing director, Claytex
3. The DYMOLA vehicle
system layout
4. The DYMOLA modeling
platform in action
www.electrichybridvehicletechnology.com // January 2020 // 141
DYMOLA, he argues, is the
optimal tool for this as “it has
application libraries that cover
the diff erent sub-systems and these
can be combined together to model
the complete vehicle. This includes
having objective measurements
of human comfort inside the
vehicle cabin.”
On the subject of batteries, Dempsey
believes that the understanding of
how to model them continues to
advance. “We’ve seen the models
develop from simple equivalent
electrical circuits to detailed cell
models that include the electrical,
thermal and ageing eff ects,” he says.
“The models allow us to characterize
at a battery cell level and then scale
up to determine how a complete pack
will behave.”
This, he adds, is already very challenging,
yet it will need to become “even more complex
in the future in order to get a fi rst principles
understanding of those systems”.
Claytex has been working on autonomous
vehicle projects for a number of years already,
Dempsey says. “We were asked to simulate a
complete autonomous vehicle, so using rFpro
we developed radar, Lidar, ultrasound, and
camera sensor models so that we can connect
to be tested, how to manage and characterize
these and, fi nally, how to automate the virtual
testing in intelligent ways to measure the
system performance.
Looking ahead, Dempsey says a major
industry initiative is the ACES trend
(automated, connected, electrifi ed and shared).
“We must constantly evaluate how we can
provide better models to simulate increasingly
electrifi ed vehicles, and how we can do that in
real time while increasing the fi delity of the
models we off er. We need to do this while
considering how we provide simulation tools
that allow us to prove that an autonomous
vehicle is safe.”
Physical testing to prove their safety is not
enough, he argues. Instead, simulation tools
need to support physical testing, but it is only
through the use of extensive simulation that
we can hope to get the level of test coverage
required to prove the safety of autonomous
systems. “To do this, we’ve got to determine
how to build accurate sensor models and
validate that they are correct, the same for
the physics of a vehicle. Then we’ve got to
develop the tools and techniques for managing
potentially millions of test scenarios, while
considering how we automate the testing and
measure the system performance across that
suite of tests.” It’s mighty task, but one that
Claytex is on the road to achieving.
the complete AI control system and run that
inside the virtual environment.
“Our focus moving forward is on how to
continue to improve those sensor models, how
to obtain better simulations for our cameras
to support machine vision applications and
how to achieve better physics-based models
of radar and Lidar.” As part of this, Claytex is
participating in several innovate UK projects,
the objectives of which are to defi ne the
scenarios for autonomous systems that need
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